Just switched from WordPress to a static blogging platform called Octopress. Kind of taking the opposite direction from last year when I was loving WordPress more.
As I have been trying to blog during my commute, I found that WordPress blogging with little internet access is just painful. Main culprit is the bloated wp-admin and oh that dreadful TinyMCE editor.
Why can’t I just use an offline editor? Well, I can - in fact back on my Windows days, Live Writer is the primary tool for my blogging. But I am not on Windows anymore, and I couldn’t see anything on Mac that comes close to Live Writer.
WordPress has just become too complicated and too distracting to me (with thousands of plugins and themes to choose from). Also I got lots of spammers trying to find some holes on my WordPress installation - evidence: 80% of traffic goes to wp-comments.php.
I then decided to give Octopress a go. Some things that I like about Octopress or static blogging platform in general:
- Better offline experience. You’d always have a local version of your blog to play around.
- Simpler platform, no database, simple rsync for deployment.
- Complete control - no need to rely on crappy WYSIWYG editor.
- Octopress is based on Jekyll - both are Ruby projects. A language that I love and use daily - I don’t have to mess with PHP anymore.
- Writing blog posts on vim - awesome!
I think I will also not bother with comments at this point.
At the end of the day - I just want something simple, Octopress seems to fit the bill.